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Terrel Rhodes

Vice President, Office of Quality, Curriculum, and Assessment, AAC&U

Terry Rhodes received his B.A. from Indiana University at Bloomington and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before moving into national higher education work, he was a faculty member for twenty-five years. Dr. Rhodes is currently Vice President for the Office of Quality, Curriculum and Assessment at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) where he focuses on the quality of undergraduate education, access, general education, and assessment of student learning. He is also director of the annual AAC&U General Education Institute.

Rhodes brings to his position many years of experience leading undergraduate curriculum development efforts, teaching public policy at the graduate and undergraduate levels, developing learning outcomes assessment plans, and forging inter-institutional collaborations with community colleges and high schools. In addition to his prior position as Vice Provost for Curriculum and Dean of Undergraduate Programs at Portland State University, Rhodes was Professor of Public Administration. Prior to assuming his positions at PSU, Rhodes served in several roles at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, including Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Programs and Special Assistant to the Provost for Assessment.

At AAC&U he is working with a project on faculty driven assessment of student learning supported by the Fund for Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE) and the State Farm Companies Foundation entitled Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE). VALUE faculty teams are developing rubrics for the full range of essential learning outcomes that can be used with authentic student work to demonstrate quality student learning. Continuing the work of the Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College project, his office furthers the importance of clearly articulating the qualities of a well-educated person, creating coherent educational programs that cultivate those qualities, and assessing to determine if they have been achieved through general education, the majors, and co-curricular work.

He has received grant support from the National Science Foundation under the Carl Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation Program; the U.S. Department of Education for the Ronald E. McNair Post-baccalaureate Achievement Program; and FIPSE for projects related to the use of e-portfolios for transfer among and between two and four-year colleges, as well as collaboration on a Lumina-funded project on barriers to transfer students.

Rhodes has published extensively on both undergraduate education reform issues and in his academic field of public policy and administration. His many books and articles cover such issues as integrative learning, e-portfolios, high school-college connections, and public policies affecting urban American Indian communities. He is member of the Ethics Section of the American Society for Public Administration.

Dr. Rhodes has been an educational consultant and outside evaluator at numerous colleges and universities, with a special interest in curriculum development and assessment of student learning outcomes, and has served as a reviewer and outside evaluator for the U.S. Department of Education.